Wolgan Valley in Australia wild, woolly

AUSTRALIA

Updated 1:52 pm, Friday, September 14, 2012

The Wolgan Valley is a largely undeveloped space that cuts past the Blue Mountains in New South Wales, Australia.

The Wolgan Valley is a largely undeveloped space that cuts past the Blue Mountains in New South Wales, Australia.

Photo: Wolgan Valley Resort & Spa

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Mist trails throughout lush Wolgan Valley, which has an eponymous Resort & Spa built in 2009 with widened, repaved roads and restored native flora and fauna.

Mist trails throughout lush Wolgan Valley, which has an eponymous Resort & Spa built in 2009 with widened, repaved roads and restored native flora and fauna.

Photo: Wolgan Valley Resort & Spa

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A guest soaks in an outdoor tub at the Wolgan Valley Resort and Spa in New South Wales, Australia.

A guest soaks in an outdoor tub at the Wolgan Valley Resort and Spa in New South Wales, Australia.

Photo: Wolgan Valley Resort & Spa

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The Wolgan Valley is a largely undeveloped space that cuts past the Blue Mountains in New South Wales, Australia.

The Wolgan Valley is a largely undeveloped space that cuts past the Blue Mountains in New South Wales, Australia.

Photo: Wolgan Valley Resort & Spa

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The Wolgan Valley, top, offers a rare sighting of an albino wallaby, above, and upscale cuisine at the Wolgan Valley Resort & Spa.

The Wolgan Valley, top, offers a rare sighting of an albino wallaby, above, and upscale cuisine at the Wolgan Valley Resort & Spa.

Photo: Wolgan Valley Resort & Spa

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The Wolgan Valley is a largely undeveloped space that cuts past the Blue Mountains in New South Wales, Australia.

The Wolgan Valley is a largely undeveloped space that cuts past the Blue Mountains in New South Wales, Australia.

Photo: Wolgan Valley Resort & Spa

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A pioneer homestead in Wolgan Valley, visited by Charles Darwin in 1836, now is a museum operated by the Wolgan Valley Resort & Spa.

A pioneer homestead in Wolgan Valley, visited by Charles Darwin in 1836, now is a museum operated by the Wolgan Valley Resort & Spa.

Photo: Wolgan Valley Resort & Spa

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The Wolgan Valley, Australia.

The Wolgan Valley, Australia.

Photo: Wolgan Valley Resort & Spa

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A pioneer homestead in Wolgan Valley, visited by Charles Darwin in 1836, now is a museum operated by the Wolgan Valley Resort & Spa.

A pioneer homestead in Wolgan Valley, visited by Charles Darwin in 1836, now is a museum operated by the Wolgan Valley Resort & Spa.

Photo: Wolgan Valley Resort & Spa

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The Wolgan Valley Resort & Spa was built in 2009 in the largely undeveloped Wolgan Valley in New South Wales, Australia.

The Wolgan Valley Resort & Spa was built in 2009 in the largely undeveloped Wolgan Valley in New South Wales, Australia.

Photo: Wolgan Valley Resort & Spa

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Wildlife in the Wolgan Valley in New South Wales, Australia.

Wildlife in the Wolgan Valley in New South Wales, Australia.

Photo: Wolgan Valley Resort & Spa

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The Wolgan Valley is a largely undeveloped space that cuts past the Blue Mountains in New South Wales, Australia.

The Wolgan Valley is a largely undeveloped space that cuts past the Blue Mountains in New South Wales, Australia.

Photo: Wolgan Valley Resort & Spa

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Wolgan Valley in Australia wild, woolly

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I am winding across mountains thick with eucalyptus, through occasional wide spots in the road with petrol stations, roadside cafes and markets, driving deep into the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, Australia.

Suddenly, I catch a glimpse through the trees of dramatic cliffs hedging a vast open space. The two-lane blacktop dips, the road turns twisty, cell phone service vanishes. I am descending into the Wolgan Valley, a long, narrow, deep depression in the earth three hours drive west of Sydney. Far below the road, the remains of wrecked cars speckle the wooded slope, a not-uncommon sight before developers improved the escarpment road three years ago.

"This used to be a very dangerous track," the driver of my hired four-wheel drive vehicle says as we pass another car wreck. Corkscrewing down the face of the escarpment, we come to a dirt and gravel track. From there we bounce across stony streams to the Wolgan Valley Resort and Spa, which opened in late 2009.

I am on the Wolgan Valley floor. It is one of the quietest places I have ever been. A posse of gray kangaroos observes our arrival, hopping about, then keeping stock-still, keeping their distance. An eagle rides a thermal over the nearly flat valley floor. Looming above all are sheer sandstone cliffs reaching 3,000 feet high, warm and glowing a soft orange in the afternoon sun.

Much of the Wolgan Valley was until 2007 a rugged cattle ranch. Another part, from 1906 to 1932, was home to a shale-oil mining venture. Toward one end of the valley lies the aforementioned resort, which occupies 2 percent of a 4,000-acre nature reserve. At the valley's other end, outside the nature reserve and tucked inside Wollemi National Park, are the remains of the town of Newnes and rusty remnants of the mining operation. The resort and nature reserve are private and posh, the ghost town and its surrounds public and rustic.

On my half a dozen visits to Australia, I have only twice pushed past Sydney, with its drop-dead gorgeous harbor, good food and drink and buzzing 24/7 vitality. From Sydney on my first road trip into the Blue Mountains 15 years ago, I rolled through hardscrabble towns that Aussies call "feral" on my way to the wine-making Hunter Valley. Occasionally, I pulled over for a snack or a drink.

In a tumbledown roadside shack, I bellied up to the bar - not much more than a plank, really - and ordered a pint of Victoria Bitter. I looked around. It looked like the bar scene in "Star Wars," not threatening, but decidedly odd. I drank my beer and drove on.

Motoring out of Sydney on my most recent visit, I took the Great Western Highway, climbing gently to the Blue Mountains town of Katoomba. Farmers' markets and tidy, almost scrubbed highway hamlets pushed up to the roadside.

They looked welcoming, but I hadn't forsaken Sydney to spend time in towns. I wanted to traverse the Australian land - not necessarily the distant Outback, but a place engaging, surprising and relatively simple to reach. Wolgan Valley and environs were fair dinkum (Oz-speak for the real deal).

Charles Darwin thought so. The great scientist and world traveler spent two months Down Under in early 1836 during his voyage on the Beagle. He, too, went west through the mountains from Sydney. Darwin, an aristocratic, insatiably curious, fearsomely bright 26-year-old, made the trip on horseback along a road cut through the Blue Mountains two years earlier.

The spectacularly eroded valleys of the Blue Mountains, Darwin wrote, "are of great dimensions and are bordered by continuous lines of lofty cliffs. It is not easy to conceive (of) a more magnificent spectacle than is presented to a person walking on the summit-plains when, without any notice, he arrives at the brink of one of these cliffs. ... He sees headland beyond headland of the receding line of cliffs, and on the opposite side of the valley, often at the distance of several miles, he beholds another line rising up to the same height with that on which he stands." Darwin's description still holds.

Darwin's host took him kangaroo-hunting in the Wolgan Valley, but the kangaroos made themselves scarce. "Did not see one," Darwin grumbled in his notebook. "My usual ill luck." While in the valley, he reportedly visited a ranch house. That pioneer homestead, built in 1832 of sandstone and topped with a corrugated metal roof, is now a history museum, meticulously restored and operated by the Wolgan Valley Resort and Spa.

Hunting is banned in the Wolgan Valley now. Unique Australian fauna and flora are similarly safeguarded in the neighboring Gardens of Stone National Park and Wollemi National Park. Wollemi National Park is notable for 4,000-year-old aboriginal rock paintings, rock-climbing and bushwalking. Both parks, like Wolgan Valley, border on the Blue Mountains World Heritage Area.

In Wolgan Valley, I explored a land creased by creeks and studded with tall trees and shrubs. A river runs through it: the smallish Wolgan River. Some visitors rode on horseback or pedaled mountain bikes. I bounced in a four-wheel drive and hiked. My naturalist field guide showed me a small native plant with a lemon-like scent I could rub on my skin to repel insects should I ever get lost in the bush.

If I do get lost, I hope it's near here. Dubai's Emirates Group spent $132 million to build the resort, widen, stabilize and pave the escarpment road and reintroduce scarce native flora and fauna.

It was while striding the resort hotel's veranda in lord of the manor style that I made my most memorable wildlife sighting: A small white wallaby, hopping across the hillside with its gray-furred mum. Wallabies, small cousins of kangaroos, produce albinos once in 25,000 births.

Small and mid-size creatures such as wallabies, possums, wallaroos and kite hawks are abundant. Indeed, there is plenty of life in the Wolgan Valley, on the ground, in the air and in the ground.

On the resort property, organic vegetable and herb gardens flank preserved 1830s ranch buildings originally built with convict labor. My guide suggested I pick a plump strawberry from the kitchen garden and brush it with blossoming lavender. I did; it was fragrant and delicious.

There are few amenities in the abandoned Wolgan Valley town of Newnes, where the old oil shale operation was based. Still, animal and bird sightings are common thereabouts and it's fun to walk amid the moldering industrial ruins and poke your head into odd attractions such as the glow-worm tunnel, a 1,320-foot former railroad tunnel now spangled with luminescent larvae.

On my last day, I went on walkabout - well, driveabout, actually - outside the valley, visiting vendors who supply food and wine to area restaurants and hotels. The foodie gospel of local, sustainable and seasonal animates these high-end producers, who cluster in and near the towns of Mudgee and Orange, surrounded by lavender fields, grazing cattle and sheep and clumps of eucalyptus.

I tasted Riesling and Zinfandel at Lowe Wines, whose owner, David Lowe, studied winemaking in Sonoma, and sipped Logan sparkling wine in Logan Wines' tasting room, a striking, contemporary glass and steel hillside building with broad views. Then it was on to High Valley Wine & Cheese Co. to sample rich artisan cheese and tour the cheese-making operation in the back of the cafe and shop. I finished at Lakelands Olives, with its organic, biodynamic, winningly grassy olive oils.

That evening, back in Wolgan Valley, I watch as black storm clouds blow thrillingly up-valley. The rain "buckets," as the Aussies say, and my hoped-for viewing of the starry Southern sky is obscured.

That's OK. I pour a glass of good Chardonnay and plop down in the screened veranda off my room. Something moves outside in the dark. It's big, slow, passing very close. It's a wombat. I'd never seen one of these husky nocturnal creatures outside a zoo. At up to 90 pounds, dark-furred, pointy-eared wombats are the world's biggest burrowing animals. They walk by night and rumble along like bears.

Even the worldly Charles Darwin was astonished by Australia, where unique life forms evolved in isolation, parallel to the rest of the planet. He wrote of Oz: "An unbeliever of things beyond his own reason might explain 'Two distinct Creators must have been at work; their object, however, has been the same.' "

If you go

GETTING THERE

United Airlines flies nonstop between San Francisco International Airport and Sydney International Airport. Qantas and Virgin Australia fly nonstop between Los Angeles International Airport and Sydney.

WHERE TO STAY

Newnes cabins and campsites: Wolgan Valley, www.lisp.com.au. Rustic riverside bush site. Recently built cabins from $310 for four people over two nights. Camping from $25 per night per car. Sturdy vehicles a must. Visitor info at the bar of former Newnes Hotel.

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